This shouldn't come as a huge surprise. Jonathan Riddell, lead developer of the Kubuntu project and the only person paid by Canonical to work on the KDE variant of the popular distribution, has announced that after the 12.04 release, Canonical will no longer be funding him, effectively putting Kubuntu on the same level as other Ubuntu variants like Xubuntu.

jriddell was trying to claim that Linux Mint KDE and Netrunner specifically depended on Kubuntu.

My point was that Linux Mint KDE and Netrunner effectively duplicated most of the work that Kubuntu does. Most of the actual writing of code is upstream from Kubuntu.

If I just straight out said that with no support, it would have no weight against what jriddell said.

So I pointed out where the code was coming from and who does what work to make my case to OSNews readers.

Netrunner and Linux Mint KDE do indeed depend on Canonical repositories for the underlying system infrastructure. Canonical need all that anyway, including Qt now. So even if Kubuntu was completely eradicated from Canonical's repositories, all that Netrunner and Linux Mint KDE would have to do is get the KDE4 source code from kde.org, compile it, make sure it worked in conjunction with the infrastructure code from Canonical, and then put it in their own repositories.

Oh, and also take over maintenance of Muon, which IMO is very worthwhile.